When Do You Lose Credibility? Message to InDinero

Oct 2nd, 2010

As a general entity – i.e. a person, for-profit & non-profit organization – credibility comes down to simply doing what you say you are going to do, and the converse – not doing what you say you wouldn’t. Politicians tend to face this crisis all too often. But so do companies. The following example is one such case.

I have been a long time subscriber to mint.com. But, for some reason, I just stopped using it some time ago. Six months after not logging in, in a while, I got this message:

At first, I was a bit shocked – because the subject of this email was “ACTION REQUIRED – Your Weekly Financial Summary from Mint.com”. This was the second time I was getting this email. The first time I got it, six months prior, I quickly logged in. This time, even though I was shocked, I realized that my mint.com account was not worth it enough to cause me to stop doing what I am doing right now to log in. I said I would do it later, and I never got around to it. So I got another one of these messages the following week.

After the 6th week, I started to question the credibility of the threat. Funnily enough, by threatening to cancel my account 6 weeks in, and not canceling it makes me want to cancel it – because it erodes the value proposition. Five months later, and I am still receiving these email threats on a weekly basis. Here is the latest:

Needless to say, I will likely send them a message requesting them to delete my account and take me off of their mailing list.

Word to the wise: InDinero, you say you are the Mint.com for businesses. There are many things Mint has done right. This is not one of them. Please learn from their mistakes. You show much promise.